Tag Archives: handmade travel

Now it’s time for the second Christmas Wrap-up post. This year my sister and I each made something for our Mom’s stocking. She had said before that she’d like some luggage tags so I volunteered to make her some.

An elderly lady in our church had given us two large trash bags full of fabric remnants and scraps. We went through and ended up keeping one trash bag full of fabric we liked, we donated the rest. I looked in the bag and found three different cute fabrics that I used to make her luggage tags.

Luggage tags are a great thing to make for a gift. You probably already have plenty of scraps you could use and they are super quick to make. I’d estimate that it takes about 30 minutes to make each one. You can speed up the process by making several at a time. While it’s a lot faster if you’re making them with the same fabric (so you can sew all of them at one time without worrying about changing thread) it’s still faster because you can cut them all out at the same time and fuse the interfacing.

So now that you know how quick and easy they are it’s time for you to make some. I used a tutorial from Skip to My Lou which you can find here. To read more about how made mine (including why I used page protectors for them) read my first post on luggage tags.

Shoes are something we can’t go without especially when traveling. However the fear that my nice shoes would get scuffed up while in the suitcase or that my tennis shoes would leave dirt on my clothes prompted me to used walmart bags for my shoes. However walmart bags are most certaintly not pretty. In order that I might protect my shoes in something pretty I made myself some shoe bags. And in order that you might protect your shoes in something pretty I made you a tutorial and am sharing it.

I have seen several different tutorials for shoe bags out there. They are what first gave me the idea to make some for myself. However none of them were exactly like I wanted, so I made my own.

I wanted a totally finished bag, meaning no exposed seams and thread. I also wanted a shoe bag with two “pockets”, that way the shoes wouldn’t mess each other up. I accomplished this by using french seams and sewing two seams down the middle of my bag creating the two “pockets”.

The bags were so easy I made three, enough for all the pairs of shoes I needed to take on my trip for a speech and debate tournament.

There are so many projects that I want to make. Since we’ve been traveling for tournaments I thought I’d make some things that would be useful for tournament travel. Some of these include: toiletry cases, contact and glasses case, etc. Some of these will be using someone else’s free tutorials and some of them I will be making myself. I’ll be posting them as I finish them, which make take a while.

This school year my family began doing speech and debate. One of the speeches I chose to do is an illustrated oratory (Don’t know what this is? Watch a national qualifying one from 2008 about Caffeine here). When going to tournaments with this speech it adds more things to carry. Thankfully at tournaments they have these awesome IO storage rooms so you can bring in your stuff on Day 1 and leave it overnight until the whole tournament is over without having to lug it back and forth from the hotel. Since there are so many people’s stuff in the one room and several people have the same bag for my boards as I do I put my name on all of my things that I leave there. For my easel I stuck a label on it, for my box (a shoe box which I covered in paper to look nicer) I wrote on it, and for my bag I used a luggage tag.

For my first tournament I made an improvised luggage tag using some cardstock, but for my later tournaments I sewed myself a luggage tag out of some leftover fabric. Here’s how I did it:

I figured there was a pattern out there so I searched Pinterest and sure enough lots popped up. After looking at several of them I chose this one.

I decided to make three using three different scraps of fabric leftover from past projects.

I followed her instructions except since I didn’t have any vinyl I used page protectors and just cut them up. It worked really well. To sew the page protectors on I used a business card as a guide. I used tape to stick it on to the tag and then placed the page protector piece on top and used big clothspins to hold it in place. Then I stitched using the business card as a guide. It worked very well.

Side note: Several people mentioned using a teflon foot to sew the vinyl on so the vinyl doesn’t stick to your sewing machine foot. I didn’t have any problems with the page protectors sticking and I used a regular foot so if you use page protectors you shouldn’t have to worry about that.

After I finished all three luggage tags (can you tell I like purple?) I used Microsoft Publisher and made some pretty business cards. They fit perfectly!

This project is great for using up fabric scraps and would make a great gift for a traveler. Plus, they’re super easy; I made three of them in an hour or two. I hope you enjoy making some of your own.